K-9 Helps Concord Cops Nab Student Hacker Who Upped Grades

CONCORD (KPIX) — A Bay Area student has been accused of hacking into his school’s computer network to change grades.

Concord police say it started with a simple e-mail from an Ygnacio Valley High School student to his teachers.

“[The suspect] made an e-mail that looked like a Mount Diablo School District site asking to log in to refresh your password or reset something and, when one of the teachers did it, he captured their log-in information,” Concord police Sgt. Carl Cruz told KPIX.

Using those passwords, police say the young man hacked into the school computer and gave himself better grades as well as changing the marks of others.

“Approximately 16 students were affected by this,” Sgt. Cruz told KPIX, adding that “some of them he raised (grades) up, and some of them he raised down.”

Police say they traced an electronic trail to the suspect’s house and searched it on Wednesday. There they found key pieces of evidence with the help of a Contra Costa County K-9 officer.

“Doug the dog — he is one of the few canines who is trained to sniff out hidden electronics and that’s what he did. He actually located a hidden thumb drive in a box of tissues,” Sgt. Cruz said.

The law needs to change on not releasing names of criminals because they are juvenile. The community needs to know when a threat exists and whom to trust and whom not to trust. I had juveniles break into my Maryland home and while the police caught one of the culprits who admitted he had broken in, we never got to find out who he was or whom his accomplices were because he was a juvenile and gave up the information before his parents arrived. Needless to say, there wasn’t anything putting him at the scene of the crime but his statement. The victims (us) got no restitution for the hundreds of dollars it cost us to repair the doors. As a result, we were stigmatized into looking at every black kid who walked by the house as possibly one of the kids who broke in. Just to say, we were in the house during the break in and my wife saw one of the young men in our bedroom and he was black. It seems unfair that the law precludes identifying perpetrators of the crime so that victims are left prejudging whole segments of society.